Anything Under the Sun Made by Man

Solos Can Produce Better Work

For several years, I have worked for a very large corporation as a solo. The client solved several difficult problems in order to employ solos and small firm attorneys, with the end result that the solos can produce better work, be more responsive, and can do so at a lower cost. In order to make this system work, the client manages all of the solos individually, which is no easy task.

The benefit is that the client gets some of the best patent attorneys to write their cases, and they know that only the specific attorney that they vetted will be working for them.

My client solved the problem of managing workloads for their solos with remarkable success.

The biggest problem for solo and small firm practitioners is that they cannot take large volumes of work. A solo cannot take fifty new cases and have them done in a month. Contrast this with a big firm with several dozen attorneys, who could take a large volume of work at any given time.

The problem with the big firms is that they can throw bodies at a large amount of work, but those bodies do not have the client knowledge, experience, or dedication to the work as a solo practitioner. In many cases, a big firm may have two or three attorneys who are familiar with the client, but many more who are not.

Because of this fact, the big firms will typically have larger quality variances than a solo practitioner would. The big firm attorneys who are familiar with the client might produce acceptable work, but the other attorneys in the firm might not. And you cannot create quality by having the experienced attorneys ‘review’ the work of the others. The old manufacturing adage: you cannot inspect-in quality.

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Don't Write Patents that ‘Hide the Ball’

I had a telephone interview with a patent examiner last week and in the course of the interview, the examiner said that he really liked my patent application because I did not try to hide the ball with the invention.

I was originally taught to write patent applications by obfuscating the invention. Specifications were required to include all of the information that was claimed, and the way I was taught was to include all kinds of details of the invention without any overview or ‘big picture’ context. The specification was merely a bag of parts from which you could write claims. There was never any structure to the parts, or even a paragraph that described the context of the invention.

The bag-of-parts types of specification was in response to an overreaction to a misinterpretation of some court cases at the time. For example, KSR was generally interpreted to hold that if the applicant provided a ‘reason’ for combining two elements into an invention that the invention could then be ‘obvious’. As part of the response, patent drafters quit including a ‘story’ of the invention in the specification. When taken to its overreaching conclusion, drafters began to remove any overall description of the invention at all, and just included the detailed elements.

Obfuscating the invention is a clever tactic when the patent attorney does not know anything about the technology or does not want to bother to figure it out.

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Different Strokes

I have talked to several different patent solos recently and it seems that each of us has our own reasons for going solo, our own work habits, and our own preferences for an optimum work situation.

I am the kind of person that thrives on large amounts of work. I seem to do my best work when overloaded. It forces me to concentrate and focus on the work at hand. When I am concentrating, I can really turn the crank. And these cases tend to be my best, even though they come at a rapid pace. I have a very hard time when the work is light. I tend to be less focused and have a hard time getting started. I also tend to get burned out after an intense period and need some recovery time.

Contrast that with an attorney I spoke with the other day. He seemed to like a much less hectic pace and preferred to do much more involved and complicated patent applications. He was not very interested in high volume work, but he wanted very challenging and difficult cases.

Another attorney had a real sweet spot: not too much, but not too little. When he had too much work, it became a real problem for him and he had a tendency to freeze when he felt overloaded. However, when work was very light, he had a hard time getting started. When he had just the right amount of work, he wrote the best cases.

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Thinking of Going Solo? Think processes.

I have met many people who have successfully transitioned to solo life as an attorney, patent agent, or other professional. I especially loved the opportunity because I got to make the entire business from scratch. On one hand, that is a terrifying thought where I had to figure everything out myself. On the other hand, it was immensely gratifying because I got to do things in a way that made sense to me.

As I was considering starting my own business, I spent a considerable amount of time designing processes with which I would run the business. I wanted to get on paper, or at least in my mind, how I was going to do things. I knew that I needed to be efficient, and I distinctly hate wasting time doing trivial things. So I set about trying to figure out how things would work smoothly.

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Writing a Good Patent Application

I do all my work on a fixed fee basis. This means that I do piece work and that I have an incentive to work as efficiently as possible.

Working efficiently does not mean sacrificing quality. I recently received comments from two inventors that said “I’m thrilled by the document’s clarity and thoroughness” and “It seems you have been able to make it almost from a single shot. It is one of the cleanest apps written that I have seen.”

I have been tweaking my patent writing technique over the last few years to whittle away the inefficiencies and improve quality at the same time.

The single most important thing in writing a patent application is for the attorney to understand the invention. If the attorney does not understand the invention and appreciate the subtle nuances of the technology, the attorney cannot write a good application.

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